Stefan Krauth "Watchlist II/2019"

In his pictures, Stefan Krauth undertakes journeys to places that seem strangely distant through his gaze and thus in a certain way often serve a cliché of the exotic, which in turn - precisely because it appears worn out through its frequent repetition in the mass media - can serve as a trigger and projection surface for true sensations. Krauth quotes these artificial worlds of longing, corrupted by commercial intentions and hollow exaggerations. They are photographs that reflect photography. Their technical means have a dual function; they are media of illusion and criticize themselves while still rejoicing in the deception they have achieved. Perhaps this is why they are so well suited for navigation. But it is the shifts in the coordinates that Krauth chooses to take him beyond the boundaries of the known world. The adventure lies very close to the seemingly familiar, it only requires a shift of the gaze. Stefan Krauth photographs photographs, and some of these photographs consist of several photographs that are linked together: a landscape gets a new sky, a figure is moved into a strange environment. Sometimes images appear in images that refer to the function of images as carriers of longings, such as advertising spaces or a picture on the wall of a room. Time and again, window and landscape views take the form of the function of images in the image.
The decisive factor for his working method is a certain blurriness, which he achieves by various means. This results from the fact that the photos are photographed from a screen. [...]
Krauth composes his works taking into account colour gradations and contrasts, but also often by centrally staging individual colours and making them protagonists of the composition. In some works they intensify and begin to glow. In their intensity they demand attention like the staged dream worlds of advertising and entertainment with their prefabricated adventures. Krauth's specific treatment, however, brings the individual colours together to form an overall picture in which a cool basic mood dominates. It results from the photographic process and, like it, creates distance. This is a deliberate distance that both triggers a longing to overcome it and at the same time can be understood as a reference to the process of media creation of the works.
(Holger Birkholz)